The article about the novelist Mary Webb contains an account of what happened some years after her death to her husband and his second wife. This is a good example of the 'curse or coincidence?' scenario, which is featured in several other articles.
I was reminded of this case by something that I recently read in a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery: there are two similar, possibly suspicious, deaths in her life too.
Each case is all the more significant in the light of the other one, and even more so when put into the wider context of suspicious deaths involving other creative people who might have used unseen influences against someone who injured them.
A summary of the Mary Webb affair
Mary Webb's husband Henry became more and more distant from her: she was difficult to live with and he was attached to an attractive young pupil of his. When Mary Webb died, the sales of her books took off; her husband soon married the ex-pupil and they got all the royalties. Their new life of luxury came to an end when Henry Webb died prematurely after an 'accident' while mountain climbing. His widow remarried, but just like Mary Webb she died of an incurable disease at the age of forty-six.
A summary of the L. M. Montgomery affair
When she was around 23 years old, L. M. Montgomery became infatuated with a very attractive man called Herman Leard. They enjoyed each other's company, but nothing came of it. Her side of the story, which she mentioned in journals written for eventual publication, is that despite being overwhelmed by her feelings for him, she rejected him because he was unworthy of her. She considered him beneath her socially, intellectually and educationally.
Herman Leard died in 1899, one year after she had last seen him, possibly of complications from influenza. He was almost 29 years old. He had been engaged to a very beautiful young woman who mourned him for some years, married someone else and died 10 years after Leard's death.
The source of the story
I learned about this story from Mary Henley Rubio's biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. The author spent over two decades researching for her book, which contains a lot of background information about L. M. Montgomery's dealings with Herman Leard and his family.
The author interviewed many people who had known L. M. Montgomery when she was alive; some of them had been around when she was staying with the Leard family. They did not agree with her account of what happened. For example, Herman Leard was not the uncultured person she later represented him as; he was considered to be the best 'catch' in the area, and his family was in no way inferior to hers.
There is no need to reproduce all the details here. The summary is in itself enough for me to formulate a theory or two.
My interpretation of L. M. Montgomery's story
I doubt whether L. M. Montgomery was being completely honest when she constructed her version of this excruciatingly painful episode in her life.
Her story reminds me of people who go for an interview for their dream job and are devastated when they don't get it. They put a positive spin on this by coming up with the face-saving story that they decided not to take the job because of some deal-breaking aspects. In reality, there may well be a 'sour grapes' element in the case: if they had been offered the job they would have accepted it immediately and with delight!
It may be that L. M. Montgomery realised with hindsight that Herman Leard was not so cultured as she would have liked and rejected him retrospectively, but I suspect that she might have accepted his proposal of marriage if he had made one at the time.
Was self-deception involved too?
Concealing the facts in favour of a face-saving story is not always done consciously or deliberately and is not always done just to put on a good front for and hide the truth from others: people sometimes put the best possible construction on events to fool themselves too.
A relevant point here is that L. M. Montgomery had a strong, vivid imagination and lived in two worlds:
“'It is possible to create our own world and live in it happily,' she once wrote to a friend. 'If it were not, I do not think I could exist.'”
It is possible that the truth was so unacceptable, so unbearable, that she re-wrote the story in her imagination, creating a comforting, face-saving, sanity-saving even, version of events in which she was the one who did the rejecting, and told it to herself so many times that she ended up believing it.
Unconscious launching of a revenge attack
The eventual fates of Herman Leard and the girl he was engaged to suggest to me that Lucy Maud was anguished and outraged when she eventually realised that the attentions Herman paid to her meant very little – some were just courtesies because she was a guest in his house and some were just his trifling with her because she was there and she encouraged him - and he intended all along to marry someone else.
In many such cases there is often great anger with the rival and a determination that,“If I can't have him, then no one else will.”
Lucy Maud said this in her journal after hearing of Herman Leard's death:
“No agony could ever equal what I once endured. It is easier to think of him as dead, mine, all mine in death, as he could never be in life, mine when no other woman could ever lie on his heart...”
The first, spontaneous, deep-level reaction by certain people to an injury may trigger the launching of a revenge attack, the sending out of a curse.
Curses and cursing
Mary Webbs's character Prue Sarn from Precious Bane felt cursed. She also appears to have been able to curse: the article tells how a man and a woman whose cruel comments hit Prue where it hurt most ended up drowning themselves. It is possible that Mary Webb herself felt cursed and was able to curse others too.
I learned from The Gift of Wings that L. M. Montgomery felt that fate had put a curse on her and those she loved.
The idea that she was cursed and that this affected others became an obsession. She said this in 1937:
“It goes to prove— though I need no further proof—that I am under some curse and always have been. No one I love or am loved by has been fortunate or happy.”
We could be for forgiven for thinking that she was right about the curse, considering the terrible state she and her husband ended up in and the misfortunes of other people close to her. This aspect of her life is covered in detail in The Gift of Wings and may well inspire some more articles.
